Demographic Theory and Population Ethics – Relationships between Population Size and Population Growth

Demographic theory aims at explaining how population systems regulate themselves given available resources. Population ethics is concerned with demography in the sense that the analytical objects of interest are births, deaths, and populations. However, demographic theory which explores theoretically when, how and why populations grow, based on empirically observed patterns, has up until now played a minor role in population ethics. Similarly, debates about population dynamics among demographers have seldom been concerned with ideas and concepts in population ethics. In this manuscript, I will give a brief outline of how population size, population growth, and welfare mutually affect each other. Theories on the endogeneity between population size, population growth, and welfare will be referred to as demographic theory. I will give a particular focus on how population growth responds with respect to welfare, as welfare, utility, well-being, and happiness are important concepts in population ethics. A key concept in demographic theory is population homeostasis (the dynamics of a system which maintains a population at a steady population size, or growth rate), in particular resource dependent homeostasis. I will also discuss demographic theory in relation to historical and future demographic change. This working paper was later published in Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics, and is available at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/at5pj/

Demographic theory and population ethics

Demographic theory is concerned with how population systems regulate themselves given available resources and external shocks to population size. This chapter provides an overview of demographic theory, focusing specifically on relationships between population size, population growth, and welfare. It then discusses four implications of demographic theory for population ethics. Speaking broadly, these four implications concern (1) the overreliance by some population ethicists on Malthusian assumptions about the average welfare of population declining with increasing population size, (2) the likelihood of certain hypothetical scenarios that feature in thought experiments used in population ethics, (3) the prioritization of extinction risks by population ethicists, and (4) the patterns of intergenerational and intertemporal inequality that population ethicists may anticipate over the long run. The chapter closes with a discussion of demographic theory in relation to historical and future demographic change.

Global Population

Chapter 3 documents the way in which, after World War II, the United Nations Population Division and Population Commission statistically reorganized the world into a series of national populations that could be compared to national economies to promote economic development and that could be aggregated to represent the population of the world as a whole. It contends that this process was initially conceived of as a nation-building project that would promote democracy worldwide by fostering the development of governmental institutions that would simultaneously count populations and constitute self-governing subjects. This effort failed, however, as disputes over sovereignty at local, national, and international levels rendered population data either uncollectable or untrustworthy. Ultimately the UN turned to demographic theory and models to fill in persistent gaps in its data tables, rendering the populations of the world tractable to control by governments and nongovernmental organizations.

Elizabeth Gaskell

This chapter focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1854–5), and Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). These works confirm Kingsley’s suspicion that a material view of starvation—and poverty more generally—offers a reasonable and reasoning interpretation of the Condition-of-England question. Starvation, or ‘clemming’, as it was known among the industrial working classes, refuses to be integrated, in Gaskell’s fictional world, into a catch-all economic or demographic theory. Instead, it is a phenomenon that paradoxically demands confrontation while evading perception through the anatomies of the workers and their surroundings. In line with the interlinking findings of biological scientists and Unitarian thinkers, Gaskell broaches the intricate questions of reform by recasting them as flesh-and-blood issues experienced through the eyes of her heroines; her novels thus ask for the sort of careful consideration advocated by science, whereby the strengths and weaknesses of subjective interpretation are tested and interpreted through the material.

Financial opportunity costs and deaths among close kin are independently associated with reproductive timing in a contemporary high-income society

Evolutionary demography predicts that variation in reproductive timing stems from socio-ecologically contingent trade-offs between current and future reproduction. In contemporary high-income societies, the costs and benefits of current reproduction are likely to vary by socioeconomic status (SES). Two influential hypotheses, focusing on the parenthood ‘wage penalty’, and responses to local mortality have separately been proposed to influence the timing of parenthood. Economic costs of reproduction (i.e. income loss) are hypothesized to delay fertility, especially among high childhood SES individuals who experience greater opportunities to build capital through advantageous education and career opportunities. On the other hand, relatively low childhood SES individuals experience higher mortality risk, which may favour earlier reproduction. Here, we examine both hypotheses with a representative register-based, multigenerational dataset from contemporary Finland ( N = 47 678). Consistent with each hypothesis, the predicted financial cost of early parenthood was smaller, and mortality among close kin was higher for individuals with lower childhood SES. Within the same dataset, lower predicted adulthood income and more kin deaths were also independently associated with earlier parenthood. Our results provide a robust demonstration of how economic costs and mortality relate to reproductive timing. We discuss the implications of our findings for demographic theory and public policy.

Demography of Conflict and the Herders-Farmers Crisis in Nigeria

The worsening violence between Farmers and Nomadic herdsmen in Nigeria has remained an issue of concern on the laundry list of the Nigerian State, policy makers, security agencies, International bodies as well as Social science scholars. While conflict is considered a normal and inevitable outcome of human relationships, the concern here is the devastating socio-economic, political and environmental implications of the conflict between these two livelihood groups as well as its impact on national development. Whereas a number of factors have been adduced for this growing violence ranging from climatic transformations, deteriorating environmental conditions, desertification, soil degradation; political and ethnic strife; breakdown in traditional conflict resolution mechanisms; proliferation of arms in the country and a dysfunctional legal regime that neglects justice; this paper, relying on the demographic theory of conflict, demonstrates how population overshoot in Nigeria explicate the new violent and widespread dimensions of the Farmers-Herders conflict. This paper, relying on the Demographic theory of conflict, argues that among the various causes of the Farmers-Herders conflict, the exponential growth of Nigeria’s population and the inability of the Nigerian State to meet the needs of the populace, contributes to the endless contest for space and property in the country, referred to in this paper as ‘population induced warfare’. In line with this thesis, this paper recommends that Nigeria as a country should begin to pay serious attention to the costs and impacts of population growth and create accordingly, rights-based population policies that adapts Nigeria’s population strength to a positive force for sustainable development.

Forecast accuracy hardly improves with method complexity when completing cohort fertility

Forecasts of completed fertility predict how many children will be born on average by women over their entire reproductive lifetime. These forecasts are important in informing public policy and influencing additional research in the social sciences. However, nothing is known about how to choose a forecasting method from a large basket of variants. We identified 20 major methods, with 162 variants altogether. The approaches range from naive freezing of current age-specific fertility rates to methods that use statistically sophisticated techniques or are grounded in demographic theory. We assess each method by evaluating the overall accuracy and if provided, uncertainty estimates using fertility data of all available birth cohorts and countries of the Human Fertility Database, which covers 1,096 birth cohorts from 29 countries. Across multiple measures of forecast accuracy, we find only four methods that consistently outperform the naive freeze rates method, and only two methods produce uncertainty estimates that are not severely downward biased. Among the top four, there are two simple extrapolation methods and two Bayesian methods. The latter are demanding in terms of input data, statistical techniques, and computational power but do not consistently complete cohort fertility more accurately at all truncation ages than simple extrapolation. This broad picture is unchanged if we base the validation on 201 United Nations countries and six world regions, including Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, northern America, and Oceania.

The influence of the cultural entrepreneur on the performance of cultural and creative firms

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse the influence of the profile of cultural entrepreneurs (CE), in terms of their demographic characteristics and resources, on the performance of cultural and creative firms (CCFs). Design/methodology/approach Departing from demographic theory and resource-based view, two hypotheses have been formulated and empirically tested, using a multiple regression model, with a sample of 80 Spanish CCFs. The CCF performance has been measured through two objective (employment growth and profitability) and one subjective/perceptual measurements (satisfaction of the CE with the attainment of objectives). Findings With respect to the demographic variables, a negative relationship between the CE’s age and employment growth, and a partial positive influence of the CE’s prior experience on employment growth and the subjective measurement of performance have been found. Regarding to the CE’s resources, the empirical evidence shows that there is no direct relationship between the CE’s possession of any resources studied − financial, knowledge and social connections − and CCF performance. Originality/value This work makes three important contributions as it analyses the CE and focuses on CCF management, a topic little discussed in the entrepreneurship literature. Second, there is an analysis of some of the variables pertaining to the entrepreneur’s demographic profile that have been applied to top management teams and in a more or less isolated way in the entrepreneurship area. And, finally, a multidimensional measurement is used to explain the CCF performance.